Alan Toner

Alan Toner

EFF Special Advisor

Alan is a policy analyst specialized in privacy and data protection issues. He represented EFF during the Do Not Track Process at the W3C, handles policy work connected with the tracker blocking extension Privacy Badger, and coordinates with digital rights groups in the EU on data protection questions. Alan has law degrees from Trinity College Dublin (LLB) and New York University (LLM) where he was later a fellow at the Information Law Institute and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy. Long interested in the politics of law and technology, his early focus was on copyright law and peer-to-peer forms of information production. He has also worked in documentary film and is a keen linguist and bibliophile.

Deeplinks Posts by Alan

Advertising industry lobbyists have long argued that tracking users is necessary to power a publishing industry that makes its content available to users for “free”— despite a heavy privacy cost. Right now, a majority of publishers make money by working with advertisers that collect personal information about users as they...

France’s data protection authority is first out the gate with a big decision regarding a high-profile tech company, and every other enforcer in Europe is taking notes. On January 21, France’s CNIL fined Google 50 million Euros for breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This is...

Today Google launched a new version of its Chrome browser with what they call an "ad filter"—which means that it sometimes blocks ads but is not an "ad blocker." EFF welcomes the elimination of the worst ad formats. But Google's approach here is a band-aid response to the crisis of...

Criteo is an ad company. You may not have heard of them, but they do retargeting, the type of ads that pursue users across the web, beseeching them to purchase a product they once viewed or have already bought. To identify users across websites, Criteo relies on cross-site tracking using...

UPDATE (6/26/18): We have updated this post to reflect how AdBlock Plus has changed the settings interface for its Chrome and Opera plugins so that they are now the same as the version for Firefox. Millions of users are trying to protect their privacy from commercial tracking online, be...

Today we’re launching a new version of Panopticlick, an EFF site which audits your browser privacy protection. Conceived to raise awareness about the threat of device fingerprinting, Panopticlick was extended in December 2015 to check for protection against tracking by ads and invisible beacons. This new update...

Today we are releasing the implementation guide for EFF’s Do Not Track (DNT) policy. For years users have been able to set a Do Not Track signal in their browser, but there has been little guidance for websites as to how to honor that request. EFF’s DNT policy...

In June, Twitter discontinued its support for Do Not Track (DNT), the privacy-protective browser signal it has honored since 2012. EFF argued that Twitter should reconsider this decision, but that call has gone unheeded. In response, EFF’s Privacy Badger has new features to mitigate user tracking both...